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Fri, 09 Dec 2016 05:57:55 +000086400Product reviews that are related to the games industry but do not fall under a specific category in our Technical, Creative or Business sectionsAutodesk Character Generatorhttp://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reviews/autodesk-character-generator-r3602
Imagine for a second that you are a producer. How would you like a product that completely jumps over the whole character modeling process, or at least that gives you a huge head-start? Well, it's time to rejoice because Autodesk's latest inspiration addresses this critical production step. The geniuses at Autodesk have recently announced the Autodesk Character Generator and you can get production-quality characters out of it in just a few hours.

One of the first notable features of this product is that it exists in the cloud, which means it can be accessed by all the various Digital Entertainment Creation (DEC) packages regardless of which one it is or its version number. Another huge benefit of the Autodesk Character Generator is that the resulting character is delivered in a supported format (either Maya .mb or FBX) that is easily imported into your favorite package and the delivered character includes all the animation rigs. The character is also fully accessible and includes textures and can be customized to meet your specific needs.

Options for Free and Paid Users

To make this service available to the widest possible number of users, Autodesk includes both Free and Paid levels. Free users have access to the entire library of features and are only restricted in their ability to use the Artistic Styles feature. Paid users also get an option to export their character meshes to medium or high-quality formats. Paid users also can endow their characters with facial blend shapes or facial bone rigs.

Users that have a subscription to one of the Autodesk products or that are on a pay-as-you-go rental plan will also have access to the Paid features of Character Generator.

All users, including Free users, will need to create a login account in order to access Character Generator. Users will also need to accept the terms of service document before continuing.

Building a Character

The Character Generator loads within a web page using your default system browser. The default page presents pages where your custom designed characters are saved and another page showing all the characters that you've exported. These pages will initially be blank, so the first step is to click the New Character button at the top of the page. You are then presented with a library of character thumbnails. Autodesk has said that there are currently over 100 starting characters to choose from and I'm sure many more will be added to this library over time.

Clicking on one of the thumbnails, shown in Figure 1, displays a full representation of the character to the left. Each character is clothed differently and can be customized.

Figure 1: As a starting point, several diverse character thumbnails are available.

The first page also includes Artistic Styles that you can apply if you are using a paid account. These Artistic Styles change the overall structure of the character to be big and bulky or alien-like. We can expect more styles will be added in the future.

Customizing a Character

Clicking the Customize button takes you to another page where you can select specific character details. The customization options include separate panels for the Face, Skin, Eye Color, Hair, Body, and Clothes.

Within the Face panel, the face for the selected character is shown up-close, but you can change the current face to any in the face library by simply dragging the new face to the top thumbnail. At the top of the Face panel are actually two face thumbnails and a slider control. You can select two different faces from a library and blend between them using the slider control. The resulting face is updated on the left. Each face in the library is named so that they can be easily identified. The current selection is also marked by an "In Use" tag to identify which face is being displayed. There are separate libraries for Male and Female faces.

Using the controls above the current face, you can change the angle of the head model to see it from different angles. You can also select a specific head part from a drop-down list to zoom in on specific head parts including Face, Eyes, Ears, Mouth, Chin, Nose, Cheeks and Hair. There are also individual sliders for each of these head parts that you can use to adjust the size of individual head parts. For example, dragging the Ear slider increases or decreases the ear size. Each slider has defined limits so you never have to worry about messing up the model by turning the character's nose inside out or something like that.

The Skin and Eye Color panels show a series of thumbnails that represent the various skin color tones and eye colors. The skin tones including everything from different human ethnicities, as well as aliens and zombies. The eye color panel includes all the standard common eye colors, but there are also rare options including alien green and cat eyes. Each thumbnail gives you a chance to zoom in on the texture to see it up-close. Clicking on a thumbnail applies it to the current character.

The Hair panel includes a large library of different hair colors along with different hair styles, as shown in Figure 2, including unique ones like a green mohawk. There are separate libraries for Male and Female hair styles. The hair thumbnails also include a button for switching to view the back of the head.

The Body panel has a library of common body sizes and shapes including separate Male and Female libraries and just like the Face panel, you can blend between 2 different body thumbnails. The character view shows the whole character and not just the face and lets you rotate around the character's body. There are also menu options to switch to a view of a specific body part.

Each of the different body parts also has two thumbnails and a slider for blending between the two. Using these controls, you can create a customized look and shape for each of the different body parts. The body parts you can change include the left and right arm, upper arm and lower arm, the chest, breasts, stomach, backside, legs and feet.

The Clothes panel has separate sub-panels for selecting shirts, pants and shoes. Each sub-panel has a library of thumbnails that you can select from and the selected clothing articles automatically fit perfectly around the selected character regardless of its customization (Figure 3). Of all the libraries, the clothes libraries are by far the largest including everything from sporty styles to formal wear.

Figure 3: Applied clothing fit the character regardless of its size and shape.

Exporting a Character

When you're finished customizing the character, simply click the Finish button and you'll be taken to a page where you can export your completed character. You will first be prompted to give the character a name. Named characters are saved as thumbnails in your Character Designs page, which is the first page you see when you sign-in. Beneath the character's thumbnail are icons to Generate Character, Edit or Delete. The Edit button returns you to the Customization panels where you can change any of the custom features.

The Generate Character button lets you export the character. There is an Options page where you can specify the Character's Height in centimeters. The default female height is 172 cm and the default male height is 183 cm. You can also set the Character Orientation to Y-up or Z-Up. For Textures, you can choose to include separate textures for the clothes and for Specular and Normal Maps. The Skeleton Resolution option lets you set the skeleton rig to use a Biped (which is a common rig for 3ds Max), or set the resolution to Medium or High.

You can also set the resolution of the character mesh to extra low (Crowd), Low, Medium and High. Several export resolutions can be selected to export together. Remember that Medium and High resolution characters are reserved for paid accounts. There is also an option to output the mesh geometry to Triangles or Quads. If you have a paid account, you can select to include Facial Blend Shapes or a Facial Bone Rig for animated facial features.

The final export option is the File Format. The available formats are Maya (.mb file) or FBX for 3ds Max and MotionBuilder. You can also select to output to both file formats at the same time. Once the options are set, all that is left is to click the Generate button and the process is done out in the cloud. Once generated, the character shows up in the Generated Characters page where it can be downloaded and saved to your local system. Downloaded files are compressed as .zip files, which includes the mesh along with its textures.

The final test is to see how the resulting character shows up in its intended package. My custom character was loaded into 3ds Max and came in without any trouble, complete with an animation rig, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The custom character exported out of Character Generator shows up in 3ds Max complete and ready to animate.

Summary

It is great to see that Autodesk is putting the cloud to good work. Rather than inserting these new character building features into each of its products, the new Autodesk Character Generator runs in a web browser and all the magic happens in the cloud. The most amazing part of Character Generator is in its simplicity. With just a few simple intuitive controls and little experimentation, any user can add complex, rigged, fully clothed, custom characters to their scenes. The resulting characters are absolutely amazing and look fantastic.

And don't be fooled by the simplicity of the product. With expandable libraries of body parts, shapes and styles, along with the ability to blend between them, the product offers a limitless number of possibilities. The big winner here is the game studios that can reduce character development and the creation of crowds from a couple of months to less than a day. Kudos to Autodesk.]]>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:20:57 +0000d7419ae04f248e5105ac3d0700389775http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reviews/10-things-you-didnt-know-you-needed-from-crossplatform-mobile-game-engines-r3576
For example, I wanted an engine which provided development in the language I already knew and was comfortable with. That actually put a very strict limitation and I was missing out on many great engines.

My second mistake was assuming that most popular engines would be the best. Yes, it is great if the engine has a large community and lots of resources, etc. But, in the end, those engines are overpriced, they usually force their own views and ways, and I was missing out on a lot of smaller popularity engines that maybe did not have all the features in the world, but actually provided the ones I need.

So while searching and jumping from one engine to another, getting burnt by limitations I found, and struggling to find the one engine I wanted to work with, I started to lower my expectations and try out a couple of less popular ones, until I found what I needed.

My best fit turned out to be Gideros (http://giderosmobile.com/) and now after being with Gideros more than 2 years now, I grew fond of it so much that I published a book on Gideros and even started working in team at Gideros to make the engine even better, contribute more, and add the other features I was missing for other projects.

So here are the 10 things that turns out I needed and can't live without them now.

10 Things You Didn't Know You Needed from Crossplatform Mobile Game Engines

1) It should be free to try

Of course the engine should allow you try itself for free, with as little friction as possible. For example, first download for free version should be without any registration and strings attached. Also free version should probably allow at least testing app on real devices, yet bettering to publish app with some limitations.

2) Handling multiple resolutions

With all the Android fragmentation and now lots of options to publish to micro consoles running on HD TVs, there must be a built in way to handle multiple resolutions.
Either it is an automatic scaling, or handling images with different resolutions, the solution should be provided by the engine giving you control over how you want to handle it.

3) Exporting to the platforms you need now

It gets very tempting to sacrifice some features you might really want, to the option of being able to export to some other platforms you don’t need now. Because you know, in case you might need them.
But in the long run, the platforms and markets are changing so fast. Lots of micro consoles spawning, and Blackberry dying etc. So if you want to target Android and IOS, don’t look also for desktop support.
And vice versa, don’t go for an engine that does not have a platform you need, thinking it will be supported later.

4) Instant on device testing

This is something I saw only on Gideros, and if someone knows other similar options, feel free to comment, but I cannot stress enough how awesome this feature is. Basically when developing mobile games for different platforms, you would need to build apps and deploy them to try them out, or use simulators, which are usually so slow. And building/packaging takes too much work and time.
So there should be some kind of built in solution. And in Gideros it is a Gideros player app, which can run code from your computer on your device with 1 click within seconds

5) Extending with plugins

When I was looking at different crossplatform engines, I was thinking it has to have it all. Oh boy how wrong I was. Firstly if an engine has it all, it is most probably so bloated, providing huge app files. And chances are, its API will be so fragmented, that some function would only work on one platform, others on other. It won't be developing once run anywhere anymore, it would be more like, write once adapt everywhere, which adds more work to it.

But what I found out, it is better to have the option to extend what you want/need with plugins, basically extending to any platform specific functionality. No more road blocks, as it does not support this ad framework, or that service, etc. Just take and build it yourself, you're the king of your app's possibilities.

6) OOP

Game development is very difficult without a proper OOP model provided in the language/environment. It's not impossible, but when you are creating a game, there are a lot of objects there (notice word objects, already indicates the preferable development approach), and their properties overlap, so you can define them in classes, inherit properties, etc.
So when I was looking for game development in JavaScript, this is what usually provided lots of development problems - the lack of proper OOP. Although it is possible to achieve something similar in JavaScript, it usually felt unnatural.

7) Full control of exported project

When exporting your project to platform specific app, some engines provided an end app, without giving you any control over what's inside and how it is handled. This feature could be arguably considered as con, because it makes you work with each native platform building workflow and learning it.
But I would want to say that learning the way it works for each platform, first makes you more engine independent, second provides more flexibility to your project, like adding an animated splash screen, third gives you control over what is inside your app and fourth provides the ways to create your own build workflows reusing dropbox, testflight deployments, etc.

Edited:
As pointed out, another con is that you will need a Mac to build apps for IOS

8) Common interfaces

The more I hear that engine X created specific plugin for service Y, the more I understand how awful their API must be. Because you see, it's basically all about marketing. X can announce that they created plugin for Y. Y can announce that they now support X, but in the end, the developer has another class with similar functionality but different usage he needs to learn to work with.

So since we are looking at crossplatform engines, they should in many cases provide an abstraction for similar libraries. For example, providing a common interface for Ads that allows you to implement lots of ad frameworks, using completely same workflow. That way if you want to change from one ad framework to another, it should be a question of changing a couple of lines, without changing the usage of interface much. Same could go for for In-app Purchases, Social portals, Leaderboards and Controller support.

9) Encryption

I once saw a situation happen to a fellow developer, that someone disassembled his app and without even changing the code, simply replaced the graphics and republished multiple variations of copies of such app. Funny thing they did not even change the email address of the support form, thus the original developer was receiving in app support emails from the copied games.

Thus it is really important to not only encrypt your code, but also assets.

10) Community

No matter how good you are at developing, when learning something new, it is really important to have someone to ask for help, to learn more quickly. You should definitely check out the forum of the engine you are trying out and try asking couple of noob questions there, to see a reaction. ;)

This was my list. Now what other features your favorite game engine provides that you can't live without? :)

title image]]>Thu, 13 Feb 2014 13:33:07 +0000842ca578342915ccb8ae069595ba7233The Healthy Programmerhttp://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reviews/the-healthy-programmer-r3336
The Healthy Programmer: Get Fit, Feel Better, and Keep Coding, I was interested. I also raised my skeptic flag, because books on getting healthy can go in two directions. They are either common-sense guides to good eating and exercise, or they descend straight into “be healthier with no effort at all on your part” pseudoscience. That's not The Healthy Programmer. This is a nice readable guide for programmers who want to avoid the perils of the I-spend-eighty-hours-in-front-of-a-screen lifestyle.

The book itself is pretty common-sense. There is little coverage of all of those fitness doodads that you clip to your body. It does mention a couple of apps that are helpful, but they are basically just little database-type “to do” lists that you can use to track your progress towards becoming less sedentary. The exercises generally do not require any extra equipment, and the eating advice looks pretty healthy. Of course, such down-to-earth advice means that you will find little that you would not be able to do with an “eat less and move more” lifestyle change. But if your game is on a hard deadline, you are probably not in a position to take a break for a salad and some yoga.

The Healthy Programmer avoids trendiness. There is no mention of toxins or cleanses or whatever kinds of lose-weight-fast plans are popular this week and will be forgotten next week. It is pretty-much "here is how to eat better and move more" translated into programmerese and put into a plan that will work with a minimum (or even zero) of leaving your office, and with a focus on some programmer-centric maladies like carpal tunnel.

If I had a complaint about The Healthy Programmer, it would be that it does not delve too deeply into specifics. As someone who is shopping for a standing desk, I would liked to have seen a better discussion or comparison of products beyond the benefits of having a standing desk and pictures of standing desks constructed from IKEA tables. Although that is a fairly minor complaint given the number of well-reviewed desks on the major office supply websites.

The Healthy Programmer is available in paper form at Amazon, or you can get DRM-free ebook versions at the publisher's site.]]>Thu, 15 Aug 2013 21:05:33 +0000ca3445d71de0ef386033037868c58d92APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneurhttp://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reviews/ape-author-publisher-entrepreneur-r3153
Author's Summary
In 2011 the publisher of one of my books, Enchantment, could not fill an order for 500 ebook copies of the book. Because of this experience, I self-published my next book, What the Plus!, and learned first-hand that self-publishing is a complex, confusing, and idiosyncratic process. As Steve Jobs said, "There must be a better way."

With Shawn Welch, a tech wizard, I wrote APE to help people take control of their writing careers. APE's thesis is powerful yet simple: filling the roles of Author, Publisher and Entrepreneur yields results that rival traditional publishing. We call this "artisanal publishing"--that is, when writers who love their craft control the publishing process and produce high-quality books.

APE is 300 pages of step-by-step, tactical advice and practical inspiration. If you want a hype-filled, get-rich-quick book, you should look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you want a comprehensive and realistic guide to self-publishing, APE is the answer.

Click the image to view this book on Amazon

GDNet Staff Review

Much like the argument that the phrase "gay marriage" is becoming obsolete in favor of simply "marriage", the old terms "vanity-publishing" and "self-publishing" are becoming less distinguishable from simply "publishing". While paper-publishers who publish paper books that end up on the New York Times Bestseller List and live on the shelves at your local bookstore are not going anywhere soon, the prestige of being recognized by a "big publisher" is no longer much of a thing. Self-publishing is no longer the home of crackpots and D-list celebrity memoirs. Self-publishing is...publishing!

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki is the latest and best book I've thus-far found about how to write, format, and sell that book that is inside you and is dying to escape. It starts with the conceptual material that you will find in just about every "how to write a book" book, but it does it without the obligatory "how to impress the publishing house" chapter. But that's not necessarily a rosy path. If you have the writing skills of a chimp but somehow manage to finagle Random House into publishing your novel on paper, you can bet that it will go through enough passes of editing that it will be literate by the time it hits the shelf. Not so with electronic publishing. APE does cover both the challenges of writing and multi-pass editing in addition to all the technical bits required to get your words into an internet bookstore.

The technical aspects of the book are quite specific and useful, and they use the book itself and the author's previous e-book What The Plus! as a test-bed for all of their experiments. After all, a 300+ page MS Word document is a pretty good way to test the depth of the various software tools that can convert your work into the formats preferred by online stores.

Despite the author's notable work with Apple, the book is quite free of brand evangelizing. He's clearly just finding the best tools to get the job done.

My main worry about a book of this type is that it will become dated and the references to particular pieces of software or services will become curiosities over time. And addressing this, Mr. Kawasaki is using himself as an example of how electronic publishing can keep a work current in the face of rapidly changing technology. The book itself has undergone several updates since first appearing in the e-bookstores. It is one of the chief advantages of electronic publishing compared to paper, and it is an advantage the author is leveraging.

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book is a work in which the author has done all the experimentation required to get a book written and formatted and uploaded and published and monetized and successful. If you have a book inside you that wants out, this book will help you get there.]]>Thu, 23 May 2013 15:04:50 +0000775bc655c77d679c193f1982dac04668